In one sense, Obama’s point couldn’t be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.
Democrats may want working-class white Rust Belters to have good jobs at high wages with pensions and health benefits, but they can’t make them vote that way.
I come from the working-class area of Stockholm, and I grew up with Serbian and Chilean people.
The establishment wants to connect with people who are like them, and I wasn’t. I’m a black gay man from a poor working-class family. Most of the people who look like me are in prison.
I come from a working-class background where I was much more likely to read socialist books and leaflets than Bronte or Dickens – neither of whom I’ve yet read.
With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.
As a working-class boy, golf was never really on my radar, and when I was growing up, Irish football was my sporting passion.
It should go without saying that there are as many working-class people who hold socially liberal views as there are public-school bigots.
Working-class actors have no identity. Our identity is playing every single poor person on ‘Game Of Thrones.’
Rock n’ roll was my art school. For many people from working-class backgrounds, rock wasn’t a chosen thing, it was the only thing: the only avenue of creativity available for them.
My parents’ parents were regular working-class people. I ended up speaking in a certain way, and one gets sidelined into doing certain parts. I think that is really quite narrow-minded.
My sympathies have always been for working-class people.
I grew up in the suburbs, a calm suburb, without tension, with working-class and middle-class people mixed together.
Much like the opportunities that factory work provided for working-class Americans in the last century, microwork will provide opportunities for marginalized people in this one. All they really need is basic literacy, a cheap computer, and an internet hookup.
I’m a progressive who knows how to talk to working-class people, and I know how to get elected in working-class districts. Because at the end of the day, the progressive agenda is what’s best for working families.
I think the reason working-class people don’t write books is because they are encouraged to believe that only certain people are permitted to write books.
During grade school, we moved to a white, working-class suburb in San Diego, and there were no Mexicans.
I reckoned my accent and class would count against me; I didn’t see actresses as being working-class.
What I say about ‘This Is England’ is they’re like my best friends back home. Normal, working-class, beautiful people who I’m creative with.
I’m from a working-class background – I had free school meals all my life and then spent six years in art school.
With upper- and middle-class lawns, there’s more hidden, whereas with working-class or poor lawns, there’s more out to see. It just sits right out there. Very honest. Like the people.
In the 1970s, girls didn’t do anything. It wasn’t their fault. For me and the other working-class girls I hung around with, our route was plotted – you were a secretary and a wife. I wanted to hitchhike around the world, go on motorbikes, be in bands.
As a boy, I was never interested in theater because I came from a working-class Scottish home. I thought, ‘I want to do movies.’ Then it was finding the means to do it.
Me, I’m a working-class man, and I go to my job, put in the work, and walk away clean and unscathed, and I like it that way.
In Britain, we need to start presenting the option of being a writer in front of black women. We need to present the idea of being a writer into poorer communities because the majority of black people in this country are working class. We need to let working-class people know that their voices are important.
Working-class and poor urban Americans are not benefiting economically from our current food system. It relies too much on transportation, chemical fertilization, big use of water, and also refrigeration.
I come from a very working-class background.
My childhood was as heavily gendered as any you would find in a working-class household in Lincolnshire.
I grew up in a working-class Israeli family, which was feminist only in its female-dominated structure.
I was a working-class kid in a middle-class environment. Fashion was my way of saying, ‘You can tap me for this and tap me for that, but you can’t deny I look good.’
Working-class, blue-collar guys who volunteered for Vietnam were ascribed certain political beliefs. It’s time that this was redressed. It had nothing to do with politics. Once these men got to Vietnam, it was a matter of survival.
I’m not running from the left; I’m running from the bottom. I’m running in fierce advocacy for working-class New Yorkers.
I come from a working-class family in Pittsburgh, whereas ‘Mike & Molly’ deals with the working class in Chicago. I swear a little, but I pretty much talk the same. It’s not like when you see someone like Tim Allen and he’s a lot bluer onstage.
There was a time in my life when I was going in and out of houses that were extraordinarily different – from a working-class terrace in Northampton to the homes of friends who were really very wealthy. It was quite an odd position to be in, I realise looking back, and quite a nice one.
It was important to focus on working-class women because we so rarely focus, particularly in period films, on the working people. The suffragettes brought together women of all classes, which was one of the striking things about the movement.
My childhood growing up in that part of Glasgow always sounds like some kind of sub-Catherine Cookson novel of earthy working-class immigrant life, which to some extent it was, but it wasn’t really as colourful that.
When the women’s movement began, it was a middle-class phenomenon. Certainly, black women had other stuff to think about in the ’60s besides a women’s movement. Working-class women were slow to get into it.
My mum grew up in Oldham and was going to work at a cigarette factory till she decided to go to drama school, so there’s part of me that wants to represent the Northern working-class background.
When I grew up, my house contained only two books: the Bible and the ‘Edmonds’ cookbook. We were a working-class household. Books were a poor second to the television, which was always on, usually with me in front of it.
Where I come from, everyone talks like me. It’s working-class Edinburgh.
People say I’ve ‘retained’ my Cockney accent. I can do any accent, but I wanted other working-class boys to know that they could become actors.
As a working-class actor, leaving school with no qualifications, being a printer and then becoming an actor and then working with people who to a certain extent had had a leg up. I never had that advantage. It’s less an artistic need to express myself and more a need to prove myself.
I’m a great candidate for why arts funding shouldn’t be cut, because I had no experience other than what was at school, I’m from a working-class town, there were no theaters, and the cinema closed when I was a kid. Anything that gave me a voice or a way to express myself I went running headlong toward.
My parents both came from working-class backgrounds, my father particularly. He came from a very poor family, 12 of them lived in a little three-bedroom terrace house in Fulham, it was very small with an outside loo and a tin bath on the scullery wall.
Mine was quite a working-class childhood with very little money, and my father was out of work a couple of times, which had quite a traumatic effect.
In the U.K., working-class lives are depicted with the characters’ humour, but in the U.S., people with difficulties are often depicted with pious or simply dreary lives.
I am born and raised in the Bronx. Where I grew up, it is a really working-class neighborhood and it does give you a really good work ethic.
Our admissions system should be a vehicle for justice, but it is failing working-class students, especially those who are the first in their family to go to university.
My dad grew up in a working-class Jewish neighbourhood, and I got a scholarship from my dad’s union to go to college. I went there to get an education, not as an extension of privilege.
I understand working-class culture, tribalism and the ethos of violence, so I make films about these things.
The North East is a tough, working-class area. Its people boast great humour. But for two days every year, when Newcastle and Sunderland play football, it’s absolute chaos. And very nasty. It borders on tribal hatred.
I spent the 1960s and 1970s seeking myself – the working-class tradition of self-education.
The working-class aspirations are worse now than when I was a kid – and it was pretty bad when I was a kid. Reality TV means they are being told they are no longer a working class, they’re an underclass. Young lassies want to be Jordan or Jade, but very few aspire to be the next Germaine Greer.
People fell in love with Alex Higgins, a working-class fellow from the back streets of Belfast. That’s what brought the game alive.
